LEADER 03840nam 22004813a 450 001 9910766998303321 005 20240202165301.0 010 $a9781912186792 010 $a1912186799 024 8 $ahttps://doi.org/10.3197/63842832816954.book 035 $a(CKB)29414762600041 035 $a(ScCtBLL)214d421a-b947-47cc-894a-b2acee3f7a35 035 $a(ScCtBLL)58b67552-78a2-44f3-9ad0-ffa7f471a21f 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC31850654 035 $a(Au-PeEL)EBL31850654 035 $a(OCoLC)1415721167 035 $a(EXLCZ)9929414762600041 100 $a20240202i20242024 uu 101 0 $aeng 135 $aur||||||||||| 181 $ctxt$2rdacontent 182 $cc$2rdamedia 183 $acr$2rdacarrier 200 00$aParadise Blues : $eTravels through American Environmental History /$fChristof Mauch 205 $a1st ed. 210 1$a[s.l.] :$cThe White Horse Press,$d2024. 215 $a1 online resource (300 p.) 311 08$a9781912186785 311 08$a1912186780 327 $aIntro -- _Hlk111115911 -- _Hlk124840559. 330 $aParadise Blues is an unconventional history of the United States of America, an unusual travel guide that follows and renders visible the country's paths of nature, history and civilisation. Christof Mauch is a leading German historian who has spent many years in the US and in this book he attempts, from a European perspective, to grasp the diversity of American culture and the transformation of its environments, combining travel reporting with nature writing, personal observation and philosophical reflection. Mauch seeks the familiar in unfamiliar places and the curious in places that seem common and well-known. The journey begins in tiny Wiseman, Alaska and the final portrait is of Portland, Oregon, famously America's most sustainable city. In between, Mauch's wanderings in space and time, his serendipitous and planned encounters with places and people, bring to light the tension and ambivalence in most Americans' attitudes towards their often-perilous environment, the intertwining throughout history of valuation, conservation and destruction. Interactions between human beings and the environment have settled like sediment down the centuries and may be read in the present - in the form of landscapes and collective memory, in bodies of water and the earth's strata, tree rings and human cells. One of Mauch's dominant themes is that the grand hopes and bitter disappointments of the American paradise are not equally distributed - the blues is the voice of the dispossessed and disadvantaged; and here environmental injustice toward Black, Indigenous and other marginalised people is a recurring and haunting motif. This is a book of melancholia and hope - Mauch exposes the beauty, the imperilment, at times the wreckage, of the American environment. And he shows us that, more powerfully than abstract ideas, governmental edicts or technological forces, stories reveal the infinite discoveries to be made in humans' relationship to nature - in beautiful landscapes where danger lurks as well as in visions and behaviours that change the world and ecosystems. Above all, stories demonstrate that where we come from and where we are going are intimately connected and therefore nothing has to remain as it is. The stories told in Paradise Blues demonstrate that vulnerabilities and pressures are almost always political constructions and, for that reason, it must be possible to deconstruct them. 606 $aAntiques & Collectibles$2bisacsh 606 $aCollectibles 615 7$aAntiques & Collectibles 615 0$aCollectibles. 676 $a304.20973 700 $aMauch$b Christof$0886001 801 0$bScCtBLL 801 1$bScCtBLL 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910766998303321 996 $aParadise Blues$94192209 997 $aUNINA